The tiny plane has a special piece of technology tied to its wing. It’s designed to detect how much ash and what sized particles are in the air. Typically the ash we can see is so heavy that it drops in a matter of hours, however the most dangerous particles are very difficult to detect from far enough away to avoid easily. The default decision of the understandably safety conscious civil aviation authorities is to block off all of the surrounding areas, as we saw last year with the Icelandic volcano eruption which caused travel chaos for about a month.

So far tests are proving positive, so much so that they are able to produce accurate models of where the ash is and how thick. These tests are only carried out at a speed of 120mph, but to work commercially, the technology would have to work much faster and at higher altitudes.

If it passes its field trials and is approved by the European Aviation Safety Agency then the company will be able to sell it to other airlines, which will mean that Easyjet will be able to recoup their research costs.